A Biography of Clarence Edward Dutton (1841-1912), 19Th Century Geologist and Geographer
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A BIOGRAPHY OF CLARENCE EDWARD DUTTON (1841-1912), 19TH CENTURY GEOLOGIST AND GEOGRAPHER Robert Stewart Anderson 1977 PREFACE 2017 It has now been 40 years and 4 months since I finished writing this biography of Clarence Edward Dutton, my Masters thesis at Stanford. This has been on my shelf, and in the stacks at Stanford ever since, read by the few to whom I lent it, or who tripped across it while perusing the stacks. Since then no other biography of Dutton has been written. Stephen J. Pyne produced his tome on G.K. Gilbert about the same time I finished Dutton. So the hole in the history of American geology that this thesis was intended to fill remains open. I apologize for not making this available sooner. Dutton’s story deserves to be told. With Gilbert and Powell, Dutton helped to open the geological and geomorphic story of the American West. While I have spent 30 years as a teacher and a researcher of geomorphology, and therefore know much better than I did in 1977 the context for Dutton’s research, I have not delved back into this thesis to update it, nor have I corrected those impressions I had and interpretations I made at the time of writing. That would have taken too much time – and it is the sense of not having the time to do it right that has prevented me from getting this out. That and the fact that this was a 115 page type-written manuscript. I did manage in 1987 to have it converted to an electronic document. It was graciously transcribed into a Word document while I was at Caltech as a postdoc… but I have since lost the little 3.5 inch floppy disk. Believe me, I have looked. So this winter, 2017, I scanned it using optical character recognition technology. I have swept through it to root out the misspellings, and corrected a few grammatical glitches, but have otherwise made no changes. While the original preface remains intact, let me expand on it to tell a little of the story of how this came to be. After all, it was a Masters thesis in the geology department at Stanford. My pursuit of this as a topic of a Masters study was allowed by a confluence of several circumstances, and involved several important people. First, let me amplify my gratitude to Tjeerd (Jerry) van Andel and the Stanford geology faculty. Jerry was well known for his course in marine geology. While I was not interested in the pursuit of that topic for my own research, time as a graduate student should be used to take good courses from good professors. His lived up to its reputation. It was well known that Jerry was available at all times, except for the hour 1 before his lectures. This was a time in which he would be giving the lecture to himself, closed behind his office door. He would then burst into the lecture room, and proceed to give the lecture again to the students, timed to the minute. So we all learned about the field of marine geology, the use of marine sediments to tell the tales of the oceans, and of the history of climate that is archived in those sediments (his 1982 book Science at Sea: Tales of an Old Ocean is still available). As a final project in that class the students were given a choice between i) writing an NSF-style proposal to perform marine geological research, and ii) taking a modern research article published within the last year, tracing its ancestry to set its intellectual context, and projecting its importance into the future. I chose the latter, as I basically get seasick in anything larger than a rowboat. I began tracing the history of a particular article backward. With Jerry’s library at my disposal, and with his recommendations for books to read, by the time the fall term ended, I was in the middle of the 19th century. I took an incomplete. Over the winter break I continued to read more broadly about the middle of the 19th century, including Bernard Devoto’s trilogy (his 1846, the Year of Decision, is a beautiful window into the events in the rest of the century), and Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the 100th Meridian and Angle of Repose (see below). Upon my return, I made use of the Stanford stacks to read the biographies of important scientists at the time. I focused on biographies written by members of the National Academy of Sciences, who apparently ask members of the academy to write biographies of recently deceased members. I found that the biography of Dutton was cursory, just a few pages long. When I told Jerry where I was stuck, he suggested out of the blue that perhaps I could turn a study of Dutton into a Masters thesis. I jumped at the chance. Given that this was well outside of the norm for topics in geology, and that I was not formally trained as a historian, I think it highly likely that Jerry had to go to bat for me in faculty meetings to allow this to happen. For that I am eternally grateful. The Stanford faculty also had at the time Arvid Johnson, to whom I am indebted for his teaching of the application of math and physics to earth surface problems. He also shared a passion, as it turns out, for the history of science in this era. The faculty also included Bernard Hallet, a freshly minted PhD from Ron Shreve’s tutelage at UCLA, who inspired my fascination with patterns in Nature, and with glacial and periglacial processes and landforms (and who would ultimately become my PhD advisor at the University of Washington years later). I owe all of these faculty members for their teaching, for their flexibility, and for their recognition that this was an opportunity worth allowing a young geologist to pursue. 2 Tjeerd van Andel. Photo by Chuck Painter, on Stanford website illustrating a memorial essay, upon his death in 2010. Second, while my contact with Wallace Stegner was short, his encouragement to continue mining the vein of Dutton’s story that he had first tapped in the 1930s was important. I already admired Wallace Stegner for his Angle of Repose, a historical novel set all over the west of North America that I still recommend everyone read. I had read it the winter before I chose to work on Dutton. And his biography of John Wesley Powell in Beyond the 100th Meridian has stood the test of time. Stegner was retired from teaching writing at Stanford, but lived in a house in the hills above Palo Alto, essentially beside the San Andreas fault. To my astonishment, he responded to my request to meet, to talk about Dutton and the resources he had arrayed upon writing his own Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Iowa in the 1930s. We met for tea at his house, he a very well known author, me a 24 year old geology student. He showed me his writing room, really a separate building (I recall it being hexagonal?), the walls lined with books to the ceiling, the windows letting in a redwood glow, and a big central table cluttered with papers and opened books. He told me of having been in touch with Dutton’s relatives, and learning about the fire that had destroyed the collections of his letters. He told me of having typed out his own copy of Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon, his most famous monograph, from the University of Iowa stacks. There was no Xerox machine at the time, and he couldn’t afford to buy a copy – even then. It was the depression, after all. But the most interesting part of the conversation occurred when the topic veered to Dutton’s role as the head of the Irrigation Survey. I had wondered aloud at what Dutton was like as a person. I had found no personal letters, no letters either to or from his wife or children. Stegner allowed as how Oliver, the protagonist in his Angle of Repose was based upon a real person named Arthur Foote, who for some portion of his career was an employee in the Irrigation Survey. The book was based upon a set of letters Stegner had stumbled across in the stacks of the Stanford manuscript collection. The letters were sent from Mary Hallock Foote, a 3 woman of New York society written to her friends back east as she traveled the West in her long marriage. (I note that these letters have since been published in 1992 as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote). Perhaps in one of her letters, Stegner thought, she describes a meeting between Dutton and her husband Arthur. Soon I too was rooting through the letters; if I recall they were still in a shoebox in the stacks. I found that indeed Dutton was supposed to have had dinner with them in the field (in Idaho I believe), but that something had diverted his travel plans. They came within a couple hours of meeting. We were robbed of a description of Dutton from the eyes of a remarkably perceptive woman. So it is that I owe so much to both Jerry van Andel and Wallace Stegner in promoting and encouraging this brief biography of Clarence Edward Dutton. Let this serve as a jump-start for someone else to carry on a more formal and expanded study of this interesting, artful, and important character.